I like my house zen. Unfortunately, I am a hoarder, so it’s not. My half-life wife has been trying to educate me by making me watch TV programmes with titles like Extreme Hoarders, I Can’t Stop Hoarding and Smelly Old Fat Bastards Who Don’t Wash And Won’t Throw Anything Away.
To some extent, this does the trick. After each …

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The solution is...

1) Coffee

2) Beer

3) Being mental and not fully in control of your senses, SUCCESSFULLY GIT RID OF OLD KIT (i.e. pack it into boxes then drive down to the recycling center - remove any harddisks first though because the personnel has developed a gluttony for old disks for some reason)

I'm totally guily of this too

I have untold amount of tech like this, not to mention a cable monster which is expansive enough to need mapping. I keep it "just in case" I need a 10m DVI cable or similar one day. The problem is you never need any of it *until* a week after you throw something away, right? I can't be the only person this happens to...

Stacking boxes

Last year I invested in lots of transparent plastic boxes that stack eight high against the garage walls. Each box has a detailed contents label - with each one containing related items. This has several benefits:

1) things can be found quite quickly.

2) the contents of a box can be classified as truly obsolete at some point.

3) unstacking and restacking the boxes to get to a desired one is good upper body exercise.

Re: Stacking boxes

I did that last year. It was terrifying how many tubs I needed for the variety of parts. I do have a small business so look after workstations, servers, networking, phones etc so there is a lot but thee boxes full of bits grew to about 25 tubs.

Re: Stacking boxes

Re: Stacking boxes

Same boxes, same gear, all in the loft. There it remains until better electronic recycling facilities are available. Much of the kit is broken, but is it better in my loft or in landfill ? Much council "recycling" == landfill IMO.

Re: Stacking boxes

"but is it better in my loft or in landfill ?"

Come off it, this is just some self justification for hoarding!

For complex products using materials we don't make much use of in the UK, the energy used in recovering the materials, and the lack of a proper local use will undoubtedly tip the balance in favour of landfill.

Re: Much council "recycling" == landfill -- WRONG

Doesn't it depend what the rubbish is? Here at my local tip workers, and the handful 'volunteers' without hi-viz bibs that seem to perpetually hang about the place, are very careful about making sure nothing with significant metal content goes into the black (landfill) bin by mistake and that mains cables are excised as close as possible from any electrical equipment as soon as it touches the ground. TVs and CRT monitors go direct into an ISO container and PCs go into the metal skip. I always assumed this was because 1) the TVs are destined for fiery death on an African beach, 2) the PCs being metal cased follow all the other metal scrap to get weighed in by whichever hanger-on's turn it is today and the proceeds get shared out amongst the council workers.

I was told there once that none of the plastic gets reused as sorting it costs more than it's worth as a raw material and the paper is not even good enough to make toilet roll as there's too much plastic tape in it. That only really leaves the clothes (which can more validly be donated to a charity) and garden waste. I believe the council runs their own anaerobic digester and uses all the compost it generates in the public spaces.

Re: Much council "recycling" == landfill -- WRONG

I know (am related to) a council worker who makes a good little profit on old sinks, taps and various bits of metal that get stripped from houses during repairs. It seems my local authority have no problem in not demanding back old boilers etc.

Indeed. Cable and connector hoarding is absolutely natural. You never know when you might need that 20m CAT5 ethernet cable. Or that 3m SCART. Or that USB cable with that propriatory terminal (usually Sony). Usually for that 2mp camera...that's in the other box. As a backup, you understand.

Don't diss the 20m CAT5 cable. They make for very good telephone extensions to go between the master socket and your ADSL router, normal phone extension cable not being shielded and all. Five minutes with a crimping tool, a hammer and some cable pins and you could double your broadband speed...

A competition, hey? Rosettes awarded in a number of categories, including most obselete kit, most obscure item, best snake's nest (sorry, cable box)...

- Gravis Ultrasound card, Analogue Joystick (transparent version, though I lost the little screwdriver), and Gamepad. The controllers are still useable (with an adaptor) but I can't imagine the Ultrasound being of much use, unless you must resurrect some ancient .MOD files.

-Some weird mid-nineties Phillips PDA with stylus

-Canon's first consumer digital camera, the PowerShot 600 (though I lose points on this, since I bought it from the 'junk bin' from outside a local PC repair shop about ten years ago. With its dock, I thought it would make a good paperweight).

4 x boxes of old Commodore User, Your Commodore, Ahoy! and Australian Commodore and Amiga Review magazines. And there's that old cover tape with the R1D1 game on it!

Awwwww look... My dear old Sinclair ZX81, my first computer, complete with 16KB Expansion Cartridge of Don't Fucking Sneeze Near It Or It Will Crash. And my beloved old VIC-20, complete with Maths Invaders, Typing Tutor and that tape of crappy BASIC games that came with it... And is that my old Casio PB-100? My god, an old desktop office cassette recorder... wow, this is becoming an archaeological dig here...

Re: I forgot something!

I moved house a while back, and the computer cables got 'rationalised'. Such that when my Mum asked me for a SCART lead for her new DVD player last week, I didn't have one. The shame! I didn't think I'd dumped those. My old parallel and serial cables finally went, and my figure-of-eight power leads. Also my old, still working, Amstrad Notepad NC100. My laptop for £200. I think I finally ended with the PS2 keyboards and mice as well, even though I just saw one of those on the back of a mate's PC that I was fixing. One PS2 for the mousey, USB for the keyboard, and it's only a couple of years old.

The cables nest only fills one large box now, as opposed to two. Also, my Windows 3.1 disks, all my old games from my IBM/Ambra 386 (except I kept Elite). I think Windows 3.1 was only 10 floppies, Windows 95 came on about 30 (if you foolishly took that option). I've never hoarded mobile phones, I've always given mine away soon after upgrading, but my computers are usually so obsolete when I stop using them, there aren't any takers.

Two-pin kettle lead

I needed an Iomega zip drive about a year ago when i discovered some old zip disks. I had no idea what was on them, the obsessive compulsive in me told me whatever it was, it was so crucial I simply had to know. Bought a zip drive off ebay, checked out the disks to find they were all blank and ready to be used if/when needed.

I'm very thorough and organised like that. I just *forget* I'm organised.

I'm also now stuck with a zip drive with zip disks i'm never going to use.

Only one?

Without looking too hard, I have at least eight boxes of cables. One is full of IEC mains leads, two are labelled 'network' and mostly contain cat5 cables, although I think there's a 10BaseT to 10Base2 converter in there too, and a PCMCIA ethernet adapter for an old laptop. One has all the cables commonly found inside PCs, one is helpfully labelled 'misc' and the rest are a mystery.

Hoard

I moved house a year ago. This was not unlike bzipping my hobby/storeroom (36m^2, 1.7327 nanoWales) and an adjacent 8m^2 room into crates and boxes, sokobanning them into a shipping container, having the containers moved to the new domicile, then unpacking the container's contents onto pallets and moving those inside. No attempt was made during packing to separate worthwhile stuff from rubbish (would have taken too much time); only the most egregious crap was dumped.

- 1 Europallet stacked about as high as the previous one, with audio gear, only a minor part of which being my intended living-room hifi. Somewhere in that stack are an Uher Reporter, HighCom noise reduction units, DAT and MiniDisc players and a Telefunken video disc player.

- one more Europallet has already been de-stacked and moved to the loft, most of which were crates of electronic parts, modules, projects, databooks and such.

- One full storage rack with, among others, a purple iMac, a Motorola Powerstack and some more 80's home computers.

- One full storage rack with electronics measuring equipment and boxes of parts.

- a Schaub Lorenz Music Centre.

- a mover's bin (1m40 long, 50cm wide, 50cm high) nearly full with CAT5 cable with lengths of up to 50m

- There's a SGI Personal Iris *somewhere*.

Stored/displayed elsewhere are a NeXTCube, a SGI O2, a Compaq Portable II, a Compaq Portable 486, some non-Thinkpad IBM Portables and a few more VAXes and Alpha's.

Oh, and there's the workshop, plus the (between me and my gf) ten motorcycles, a moped and a motorised cargo bike. With their complement of spare parts (including gearboxes, crankcases, front forks and rear suspension units).

"I'm also now stuck with a zip drive with zip disks i'm never going to use."

Nonsense - bung them on eBay and some other muppet will buy them. I know this because we moved office recently and have been off-loading all manner of crap old kit to benefit the End of Year Pissup Fund. It's in the black to the tune of over $1,000 already...

Zip drives are still in demand it seems based on how our stash have gone. I'm still looking for the power supply for a USB Zip250 and the whereabouts of the old SCSI Zip100 (I reckon an ex has it - it provided termination for the external SCSI chain on her PowerMac...)

Re: I found in my dads garage.

Re: I found in my dads garage.

"An Elonex 386sx laptop"

I've still got an LT386SXP/16 (that's the one with the orange plasma screen and no battery), sitting in a cupboard. I don't think I've powered it up in the last 10 years! Just found the 5 1/4" external floppy drive and a 3 button logitech mouse with an RS232 interface I used to use with it! I think I bought it in 1990.

Also found, a Z80 CPU, a couple of 6502s, a little pile of 2114 static RAM (from about 1980) and a pile of 256Kx1 dynamic RAM in DIP packages, the latter pulled from a 286 system I got rid of in 1991 - thought the memory 'might come in useful sometime' - err, well... not in the last 21 years, it didn't!

Re: Hoarding?? Never!!

And another one here...

Also occasionally nagged by my better half to have "a clear out".

But that said her mother did ring up a few months back complaining that an electronic somethingorother (I forget what it was offhand) had stopped working. Diagnosed as a failed power brick - cue reading of power requirement label, shufty through my version of aforementioned boxen, appearance of fully working power brick kept after its associated gadget went tits-up and lo, one relatively happy mother-in-law, at least briefly.

Not to mention the walk-on cameo role that a couple of handfuls of old memory chips made a while back as visual props when I had to give a training presentation about my job, which seemed to rate all sorts of brownie points from the PowerPoint droid giving the course.

So here's to the boxes of cables, all coiled up and nests for mice (and keyboards).